(a) Field of the invention
This invention relates to traffic analysis of public telephone stations. More particularly, it concerns an arrangement such as a traffic analysing apparatus or a remote surveillance system to analyse a number of public telephone stations which are served by a given number of telephone exchanges.
These public telephone stations or pay stations are generally placed in phone-boxes or telephone booths which are available to the public and are basically characterized by outgoing traffic. These public telephone stations are generally based on payment in advance or on payment by coin boxes.
(b) Description of the Prior Art
It may immediately be noted that the analysis of traffic of such telephone stations, according to the invention, is based on the interpretation and the recording of a number of charging pulses which are transmitted from the exchange to the telephone station after a communication is established from the station. This traffic analysing arrangement is not based, as are most known traffic analysing system, on observation of the supervisory signals transmitted from the telephone exchange when a communication is established in order to detect defects inherent in the operation of the intermediate circuits between the calling and the called telephone stations, such as trunks and telephone lines.
Information on public telephone stations which are broken down or out of order is at present given by users by means of the complaint call number at present in force or by the coin-box emptying personnel or by the personnel in the telephone exchange assigned to the public telephone stations. The fact that information on stations that are out of order is not immediate and is postponed in most cases for several days, contributes to maintaining a great number of these stations in a state of non-utilization and of faulty operation before the maintenance service is warned.